It’s 277 miles from the oil field-turned-bedroom-community of Orcutt, in Santa Barbara County at the southern end of State Senate District 15, to tony Saratoga at its northern end. In the next seven weeks, John Laird will get to know them all.
On May 3 the former Assemblymember announced his candidacy for the seat vacated by freshly appointed Lieutenant Governor Abel Maldonado, kicking off a hectic drive toward a June 22 special election in which he’ll face Assemblymember Sam Blakeslee, a powerful San Luis Obispo Republican. The date is widely viewed as a handicap for Laird, as Democrats are thought to suffer in low-turnout (i.e., special) elections, but he exudes confidence anyway.
“It means this race is really doable, it’s just compressed into 50 days,” he says. “It gives me a chance to energize people in a way that will turn the election.”
Laird has already begun making trips to the southerly part of the district, where he’s less well known than in the northern stronghold of Assembly District 27, where he served for six years until being termed out in 2008. Visits to agricultural towns like King City and to Santa Barbara for a recent annual Democratic committee dinner mean lots of time on the road—the least of the liberal Democrat’s challenges in this shamelessly gerrymandered district, with its peculiar silhouette comprising hand-picked segments of five counties.
The most serious challenge lies in the makeup of District 15, which is roughly divided between a coastal, suburban Democratic-leaning north and an agricultural, Republican-leaning south. Party registration numbers more or less even out, but moderate Republicans have held the state senate seat for 14 years, just as lawmakers intended them to when they redrew the district in 2001 as part of a complicated political deal.
Laird’s challenge, then, is to win over Republicans, Independents and decline-to-state voters while galvanizing his Democratic base. It seems that one way he intends to do this is to emphasize his own commitment to bipartisanship while highlighting the failure of the budget process and tapping into disgust with government. “The legislative gridlock over the budget has paralyzed state government and become a national embarrassment,” he said Monday. The statement almost had the ring of an outsider’s words—ironic since Laird chaired the Budget Committee for four years—and it also served as a tidy dig at his opponent, who, as Assembly Minority Leader, was one of the “Big 5” sitting at the table when budget negotiations broke down so abysmally last spring and summer. He also took the opportunity to remind the crowd of his environmental credentials, reconfirming his opposition to offshore oil drilling and his support for state parks.
Speaking several hours after his speech, Laird said that even though he was “very successful across the aisle” during his years in Sacramento—in particular he cites the creation of the Sierra Nevada Conservancy and a committee he chaired on state mandates, which are payments the state government makes to local governments—practicing bipartisanship in the current climate isn’t going to be easy. “I had a number [of bipartisan successes on the budget],” he said. “But I’ll be honest. They were in different times.”
